Agonistic Behavior
Understanding Competitive Behavior in Animals
Agonistic (competitive) behaviors are those behaviors which cause, threaten to cause or seek to reduce physical damage or injury to an individual animal. Agonistic behavior is made of a suite of three different divisions of behaviors: threats, aggression, and submission.
While any one of these divisions of agonistic behavior may be observed alone, they usually occur in sequence from the start to the end of an interaction between two animals. Agonistic behavior may occur between different species (interspecies) or between members of the same species (intraspecies). Intraspecific agonistic behaviors are most commonly: intermale fighting over mates, resources (food, water, space) defense, intergender fighting, and aggression. (Predatory or defensive behavior between members of different species is not regarded as aggression.)
In nonhumans, intraspecies aggression usually revolves around the establishment of a dominance hierarchy, usually for the purposes of mate selection and breeding. In general, the more highly ranked an animal is in the hierarchy, the more aggressive it is compared to lower ranked (subordinate) individuals.
Human aggression is a more complex issue with one or more social undertones of culture, race, religion, morals, and social status involved. Human aggression may be broadly categorized as either hostile or retaliatory aggression, or predatory or goal-oriented aggression. Whatever the category, aggression in humans can be physical, mental, or verbal in form.
Agonistic Behavior is a Guarded Affair
Depending on the importance of the resource as well as its scarcity, agonistic behavior can range from a fight to the death to much safer ritualistic behaviors.
Any agonistic interaction between two animals is up close and highly personal because animals typically lack action-at-a-distance weapons such as those possessed by humans. Consequently, animals usually avoid fighting unless there is sure indication that they will win without incurring injury and if the resource is worth risking injury or possible death over.
Animals often possess sophisticated rituals in which they attempt to bluff their opponent into backing down or fleeing. Animals also often have a good innate sense of when to retreat as losers from an otherwise hopeless and potentially damaging cause. Even though many animals possess specialized weapons of beak and claw or horn and tooth, agonistic behavior only rarely results in injury or death.
Ritualistic Displays as Weapons
Self-survival has necessitated that animals develop and utilize numerous ritualized threat displays. Mating fights, territorial fights, or fights for food are much more often symbolic jousts than they are battles to the death. Male gray catbirds will fluff their feathers, spread and lower their tails, and as a last resort, spread their wings during territorial boundary disputes with other males.
Sparring for reproductive territory, fiddler crabs will display and wave their enormous claw but even if intense fighting breaks out, the crabs grasp each other in such a manner that injury does not occur. The clashing and rattling of horns when bighorn sheep rams charge head long into each other can be heard for hundreds of meters yet their thick skulls and massive horns insure that only rarely and accidentally does serious injury take place.
The silverback males of the mountain gorillas may demonstrate the most elaborate displays. With great hooting, throwing of vegetation, chest pounding, leg kicks, and sideways running, these massive animals attempt to intimidate each other without actually making contact. Nevertheless, their aggression can, occasionally, escalate into the death of a rival. Slashing with huge canines that can open gaping wounds, silverback mountain gorillas will sometimes battle to the death. Similarly, bull elephants sometimes turn to a type of combat that sees each warrior using tusks to attack weak points in the other’s body.
Aggression seems to be both useful and destructive at the same time to both nonhumans and humans alike.
Agonistic Behavior is More Ritual than Combat
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Science & Nature
Latest Articles